


oh, what if we're far from home

by mushydesserts



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Feelings, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Growing Up Together, Libertus's bad language, M/M, Pining, Small town living, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, holiday schmoop, lowkey a fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13139865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mushydesserts/pseuds/mushydesserts
Summary: Nyx and Libertus had never really met for the first time. They'd always justknowneach other. His mother had said they'd met in the womb, a few months and four lineages removed: their parents had been friends, as everybody's parents were in their village, and Nyx and Libertus had known each other's wailing voices before they'd known their own names."You're telling me you two've been like this since you werebabies," Crowe accuses when she hears about it twenty years later in a shithole pub somewhere in the slums of Insomnia."Like what," Nyx says, relaxed, over his third beer. Libertus eyes Nyx warily.(Libertus has had a massive crush on Nyx since forever. Literally everybody can see it.Not Nyx, though. Nyx can't see it. Thank fuck, Libertus thinks.)





	oh, what if we're far from home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DragonGirl218](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonGirl218/gifts).



When he had been seven years old, his mother had looked at him as he'd sat on the kitchen counter, his face flushed and sweat on the back of his neck despite the cool humming of the old refrigerator against his shoulder in the summer heat. Tiny plasters covered four-fifths of the exposed skin on his legs; both his arms were swathed in gauze from elbow to fingertip. He had avoided her gaze, scowling.

She had studied him with a careful eye and a bite to the corner of her lip. He would later realize how hard she had to try not to laugh. His mother had always been kind about this sort of thing.

"Lib, sweet," she had finally said, careful and fond. "I'm sure Nyx will still like you if you can't get his ball down from the roof."

"It's not a _ball,"_ Libertus had burst out, despair drawing his words out into a wail. "It's a _throwing disc_. It's a _weapon_. And it's not _just his,_ it's supposed to be _ours_ , his dad had a chalikar just like it and his dad gave it to him and he shared it with me and it's — " Libertus tried to calm down before the threats of no dinner came, voice catching on a hiccup," — it's _ours_."

It had been four days into summer break, and Libertus had been in an absolute state about it: gold sunshine and buzzing insects and fields of tall grass that kicked up fuzz when the kids all ran through it with sticks on the way back home, careless and shouting, a thousand gnarled trees to climb and brooks full of tadpoles to scoop up, honey-drip flowers to crush between fingers and dusty rocks to turn over in search of mythical invisible lizards, all wide open to discover, and a spare toss had sent the disc sailing over the rusty barn rooftop on their third practice of the season, to Libertus's helpless dismay.

Nyx had told him it wasn't his fault. "Dang," he'd paused after a good solid twenty minutes of throwing branches at it in hopes of knocking it off. Then he'd tilted his head, stared at it a bit longer with a furrow in his brow and said, "Didn't know you could throw like that."

Any pride Libertus had felt at the hint of awe in Nyx's voice was immediately at a great and excruciating war with regret as they surveyed their somewhat-bleak options.

"I'll see if we can get another one," Nyx had said as they parted ways, faint smile and pat on his arm with the sunset before he'd trekked down the lane back towards his house, and Libertus had spent the next eighteen hours trying and failing to climb the damn barn without tumbling headlong into the hay below.

Nyx would still like him, yeah. Nyx didn't blame him, he'd said as much. But Libertus — what kind of jerk let a friend _like_ him after pulling something like _that?_ Libertus'd have beat the heck out of another kid who even tried. And to _Nyx?_

Libertus hadn't felt the need to explain this. He had been seven years old, and it had been glaringly obvious to him. So he'd just sat and fumed, staring at the ragged linoleum floor.

His mother had somehow looked even fonder of him then, exasperated and lovely, and plucked a thistle out of his hair where it was hanging above his ear.

"Wait until your father gets home, then," she had said. "And we'll get the ladder out."

"Okay," Libertus had said meekly at that, and privately mourned that he'd needed the help.

But he'd give the disc back to Nyx the next day, embarrassment forming his hand into a fist behind at his side, and Nyx's surprised blue eyes — after the other boy had frowned at the bandages, solemn, before he'd ascertained no lasting harm had been done — would be worth it.

\--

Nyx and Libertus had never really met for the first time. They'd always just _known_ each other.

His mother had said they'd met in the womb, a few months and four lineages removed: their parents had been friends, as everybody's parents were in their village, and she and Nyx's mother had spent that year's summer-end barbecue with their palms pressed to each other's bellies, in awe in lieu of the ale and punch. Nyx and Libertus had known each other's wailing voices before they'd known their own names.

Nyx had been shy at the start, and Libertus had always been loud, and Libertus hadn't figured out how to talk to Nyx until a few years later. There were other kids, a screaming and giggling herd let out every morning into the fields and lured back by the promise of someone's mom's cookies or someone's dad's ice cream just before noon. Girls liked to order Nyx around; he was quiet, and pretty, and small, and he'd wear the flower chains and the bead bangles they made without complaint. Boys liked to leave him alone so as not to get roped into the whole thing. That was how it was until Libertus wrested Nyx away at about age six.

 _You don't gotta play with 'em,_ Libertus had demanded, as if personally affronted. (Nyx would remember this in later years, and Libertus would have no recollection of the exchange whatsoever.)

Nyx had shrugged and gone back to be the youngest prince of the fourth queen's kingdom, cursed to sleep in an empty trough until released from the spell by the second princess's kiss, and Libertus had been distracted by someone else's game of hide-and-seek.

The next day, Nyx had arrived with pocket change for iced tea at the general store, and had offered half of it to Libertus so they could both get sticks of candy instead. Libertus had taken him up on that. They'd split most things fifty-fifty ever since.

\--

"You're telling me you two've been like this since you were _babies,"_ Crowe accuses when she hears about it twenty years later in a shithole pub somewhere in the slums of Insomnia.

"Like what," Nyx says loudly, relaxed and amused over his third beer. Libertus eyes Nyx warily; Nyx looks completely at ease. Someone breaks a glass in the corner, and the cheering rises as a fight starts eight feet away.

Crowe just reaches over and scrubs Libertus on the head _extremely hard._

"Ow," Libertus protests, and Crowe downs her tequila and yells over the ruckus at the bartender to bring over shots for the both of them. Pelna just sniggers, the bastard.

\--

Crowe had shown up when they were eleven.

She was part of a group of raggedy people passing through on the way to somewhere or nowhere. The harried-looking grownups went about looking for places to lodge, while the kids sat in huddled groups by the roadside and rose to trail after the wagons of potatoes that rumbled by every so often. Libertus would overhear his parents talking about it in worried tones late at night: the villages way up to the North were completely gone. The bombing raids were targeting military posts, but the civilians caught in the crossfire had nowhere to go, and the question was, how far south would the war follow?

Crowe had found Libertus when he was running out to the store. Then she'd followed him home, silent all the while. And then his parents weren't going to make her sleep in the barn — it was just the one of her, anyway, no siblings or parents or cousins or what — and then by the time the rest of the remnants of her village had moved on, none of the Ostiums could stand to get rid of her, even if they could figure out how.

She was tiny, scrawny, muddy, with big brown eyes that fixed on you accusingly when you tried to ignore her. Libertus's mother had been baffled about what to do for clothes until Nyx had come over, tilted his head at her, and tentatively said that he thought Selena might have some stuff she could share.

Crowe had stuck to Nyx's side whenever he came over after that. Nyx showed her how to play the slapping game, and Libertus never forgave him for it, and when Crowe started talking, she declared that when she married Nyx, Libertus could marry Selena, and then they could stay together all the time in a houseboat on the river and own a chicken (Crowe loved swimming and would happily stay in the river until she got pruney every day, which would be her natural state all through dinner for most of the summer and the fall every year).

"I don't think the chicken would like it," Libertus had said. "Besides, you can't marry Nyx."

"Why not?"

Libertus had floundered. "Because you're my little sister," he'd said.

Crowe had looked unconvinced, and Libertus had suspected she was probably right to do so. "Fine. I get Selena. You get Nyx."

"I can't marry Nyx," Libertus had spluttered. "He's my..." Libertus had trailed off.

"I'm gonna go find the chicken," Crowe had decided unperturbed, and run off to steal a neighbor's chicken. Libertus had followed, red-faced.

\--

Wrapped in his Glaive-issue sleeping bag with the completely-broken zipper, Libertus squirms, flinching away from the buzzing in his left ear. He settles, and then jerks again when the buzzing returns, hovering, near his right ear.

It's always too hot when they're out on the front. Even when the brush isn't burning five miles in every direction from the Niffs' missile storms, they're far south enough that the heat is a bitch whenever the wind dies down. There's snuffling from the other tents where the Glaives from the Western regions are sleeping like the dead: compared to the Leiden heat, this is nothing.

Nyx sounds drowsy when he speaks up. "You all right?" It's always a toss-up as to whether Nyx is asleep or not, because he lies still and doesn't snore and it's almost impossible to tell. Libertus is a body's-width away from him. If he reached over, he could touch fingertips with the other man. It's a wonder Nyx gets any rest at all.

Libertus slaps at his neck, scratches at his back, shuffles over onto his side and grits his teeth. "It's a fuckin' mosquito," he hisses.

"D'you use the spray?"

"Yeah."

"Not working?"

"No, it's just — " he slaps his own jaw, seethes, " — son of a _bitch —_ it's hot and I don't wanna take off my shirt because this _fuckin'_ mosquito is gonna gnaw all over me — "

"They can bite through cloth," Nyx mumbles. "It's the heat from your body. Just lay still."

"I am laying still!"

"I can sing if you want," Nyx says, sleepy and slurring, because he thinks he's hilarious.

Libertus thinks of his mother, and of Nyx and Selena and Crowe and camping out in a pillow fort in the treehouse above the brook, campfire lighting the way back to the house where his mother and father had left lit candles in the windowsill if they'd needed to go in for the bathroom or a blanket or a midnight snack of leftover apple tarts covered in a cloth on the counter, muddy bare feet trekking all over the back porch and the screen door sliding shut with a creak, Selena's little voice humming lullabies for Crowe in the dark when they made it back.

"Yeah? You remember?" Libertus says, after a pause.

Nyx chuckles. "They aren't exactly complex songs to remember," he says, misconstruing, and Luche's voice snarls from somewhere in the depths of the tent _if you two don't go the fuck to sleep in the next twenty seconds I am going to gut you both and use your skins as padding_ and Nyx says _sorry_ and Libertus lies there, awake, thinking about home.

\--

Nyx stopped going to school at fifteen when his dad died and his mom needed him to help around the bar.

Libertus stayed to finish the semester, and in those three months he realized for the first time how bad he actually was at school. He kept forgetting deadlines without Nyx around to remind him, and everything he turned in was half-finished and riddled with mistakes, and his arithmetic slipped, and his memory for sciences got shittier without Nyx around for him to have to explain things to before tests. He limped that year to a close. At the end of it, his mother just looked sorry instead of being angry, which made him think maybe it would be okay.

He'd snuck out on lunch break more than once to find Nyx sitting on an overturned bucket out back of the rickety little bar his family kept, having a smoke where his mom couldn't see. Libertus had brought him soda, beers, candy, chips, pills scrounged up from somewhere (Nyx turned these down adamantly). They shot the shit and Libertus kept him updated about their classmates. "You watching out for Selena?" Nyx had enquired, slightly threatening, and Libertus told him about how Crowe got suspended for a week for punching out a kid who tried to pull Selena's shirt up.

One of these afternoons, Libertus exhaled and said, "Hey. You want another set of hands around here?"

The bar got busier during summer, so Libertus had made sure he was around, hauling sacks of potatoes around the back room or hosing down the dishes when he had nothing better to do. The Ulrics didn't need to hire anybody that year, and they saved up enough to get new rain boots for Nyx and Selena. The customers had all beamed at Libertus and called him _Nyx's sweet friend, the Ostium boy._ Libertus hadn't gone back to school in the fall.

Crowe had complained horribly. _"Libertus_ gets to skip," she'd said, offended. She was failing three subjects and the teachers no longer bothered to keep her after school because she was a bad influence on the other kids and there was nothing left to threaten them with in detention.

"Libertus is working," his mother had said. "We'll talk about it again when you're sixteen."

"We'll talk about it when you graduate, Crowe," Libertus had corrected, and Crowe had whined until Libertus and Nyx agreed to show her how to make all the bar cocktails as long as she finished her homework.

Nyx's mother retired when he turned eighteen, and the bar was theirs, fifty-fifty, like it'd always been. They'd kept at it until they were twenty. Later, Nyx and Libertus would inevitably be in charge of drinks at the Glaive parties, because Crowe refused to pour them drinks on principle, and nobody could make a proper fucking Eden Buck out in Insomnia, and also whenever Tredd got too wasted and started yelling _Hey Ostium, you ever gonna suck Ulric's dick?_ Libertus could shoot back _Hey Furia, you ever gonna stop licking the Captain's asshole?_ and cut him off.

\--

"Party at Khara's," Tredd says, claps Libertus on the back, throws up horns and strides out into the hall preening before Libertus can get his shoe on and look up properly.

"What?" he says abruptly, straightening up and narrowly missing knocking his head on his locker door.

Pelna's straddling the bench next to him eagerly, and Crowe's got her hand on his shoulder, leaning over them both.

"Yeah, we're gonna check out his new place, finally," Crowe says. "See what all the girls are about. You up?"

"Dress code's Ugly Solstice Sweaters," Pelna adds.

"If Luche shows up without one we're gonna put him in that weird fluffy thing Pelna got from his granddad last winter, the one that sheds bits of white feather everywhere? It'll almost be like there's real snow."

It doesn't snow in Insomnia. Libertus hears it doesn't even really snow in Galahd, but at least they get enough of a dusting that they get to laugh when the first frost sends the city folks into a rush-hour panic. "When?"

"Next Saturday," Pelna says. "It'll give us enough time to sober up before we gotta report back in."

"Be there," Crowe says, and Pelna beams and gets up, and Libertus heaves a sigh and slams his locker door shut.

\--

Winter Solstice in Galahd was always kind of a big deal.

Everybody would've had the harvest sorted out by then and there would always be just a _ton_ of food, both the pickled cabbage stuff that nobody liked (it gave off fumes that made the town hall smell for _weeks)_ and the glazed anak meat roast and sugared carrot cake that everybody fought viciously over. The brooks would freeze over, just enough to go ice-fishing, if not skating. The kids all got a little spiked cider with nutmeg in it, and everybody stayed up late enough to fall asleep in the early hours, snow lit up by the spirit lights in the sky over Galahd.

Libertus kind of misses that. People in Insomnia make it a big deal, too, but it's commercialized to all hell, more about blazing billboards and pine-scented trees covered in ribbon and baubles in the lobbies of government buildings and shopping mall atriums (the trees _ain't even real)._ The Glaives come from all over and all celebrate differently, different traditions and all, which makes it even weirder, if a little more human.

The first winter Libertus spent in Insomnia, Sonitus had asked him what he was getting people for Solstice, and Libertus had discovered that you were actually expected to _buy gifts_. And not like, just a bottle of wine. Things to be treasured, or to be shoved into a closet and forgotten about, depending on the person.

He'd thought hard about it, and then discovered that you couldn't buy a single thing without wrestling someone and being charged with criminal assault in the days leading up to the holiday, and so he'd shown up empty-handed with an apology, Nyx looking surprised at the door and Crowe cussing out a garland of glittery plastic threads as she tried to stick it round the ceiling behind him.

"Nah, it's fine, you're the present," Nyx had said, and opened the door to wave him in.

"I was gonna get something good, I meant," Libertus said.

Nyx paused, carefully stuck a self-adhesive ribbon bow to Libertus's chest, patted his shoulder, grinned and said, "Eh, what's better than you? Get in here."

Later that night, Libertus stared at the ceiling fan from the couch while Nyx dozed with both his arms wrapped around Libertus's legs, and a few days later, Captain Drautos frowned and took him aside and asked if he needed some time off to deal with personal stuff. "Get some rest," Drautos had suggested, and Libertus had narrowly avoided retorting that if he could sleep off a gay crisis, he'd have asked Luche to knock him out years ago.

\--

"Where's hero?" are the first puzzled words out of Pelna's mouth when he opens the door on Saturday.

Pelna was right: it's a nice flat, wide window and hardwood floors and all. The television is on inside, and there's yelling and sparkly confetti everywhere, and music is blaring and Tredd and Axis are making fun of Luche's sweater. Libertus shoves the bottle of wine at him and steps inside, stomping the water off his boots. "What?"

"Nyx."

"I dunno."

Pelna looks bewildered, and Crowe is making her way over, wearing some sort of tacky brightly-colored headdress with blinking lights and bells on it. Her smile falters a little when she gets there, looking around Libertus, behind him, and finally at him, eyes still accusing like a pin to the throat.

"Where's Nyx?" she says.

Libertus blinks. "I dunno."

"Etro, what happened now?" Pelna looks distressed.

"Nothing happened," Libertus says, baffled.

"You dunno where Nyx is?"

"I dunno, did he say he was coming?" Libertus is standing there dumbly in his jacket and hat, and hasn't taken his boots off.

"Did he — what?" Crowe takes the bottle from Pelna, frowning. "What'd he say to you?"

Libertus stares in confusion. "Yeah, nothing. I dunno. Did you invite him or what?"

"Oh my gods," Crowe says, as Pelna blanches. Libertus is starting to wonder if he did something wrong.

Crowe shoves the bottle back at Pelna and grabs Libertus's jacket lapel and forcibly ushers him back out into the hallway despite his protests. "Go find him and buy me some vodka," she says, and the door slams shut behind him before Libertus can figure out why.

\--

 _yo where r u,_ Libertus texts, his fingerless mittens tugged back, and then he slips his phone into his pocket and his hands along with it.

The sky is dark, the darkest it is all year, an impenetrable blanket of clouds lit up pink and orange in a toxic glow where the jumble of skyscrapers and bridges and poles and wires and lights reaching up on all sides open up just a crack above. The sidewalk is wet and grey and slippery beneath, no ice, not properly, just mud and gutter water and salt, and when the chill wind whips by around the corners and down the alleys, it smells like cooking oil and exhaust.

The only people around are really giggling couples, stumbling to and fro in each other's arms from this or that party, or late-working folks huddled in the dark striding determinedly towards home. Holiday music echoes through deserted plazas, and a few dining stalls lining the street are crowded with revelers, warm glow and raucous laughter, fans blowing heated air from the metal-coil heaters behind the clear tarp.

Libertus likes it when it's empty in the city. It rarely ever is on anything but holidays like this, and it makes Libertus feel kind of like he belongs, like he's got every right to enjoy the storefront displays and the steaming hot coffee from the shops, to shake his head when a car drives by full of bellowing youths, or yell at a cyclist who's not watching where he's going, like he's some old-ass man getting real grumpy.

Nyx's grody apartment is pretty far away, but not too far to walk. Libertus is halfway there before he gets a textback and changes directions.

\--

Nyx is sitting with his legs over the edge of the completely empty training grounds when Libertus arrives.

It makes him look oddly young, and reminds Libertus of when they used to sit like that in the big tree just off the side of the pond, skinny legs dangling underneath them.

Nyx looks up when Libertus approaches, and Libertus sees that he has half a pack of beers tucked into his side. If the Captain was here, they'd get their asses kicked, no question, but nobody is here — Libertus isn't even sure how Nyx got in — and so Libertus just accepts one when Nyx silently offers it, cracks it open, and sits down awkwardly at his best friend's side.

"Hey, so, I think I forgot to invite you to Pelna's Solstice party," Libertus says, scratching his neck. If he really strains, he does remember hearing someone saying something about plus ones, and then Tredd snorting. Libertus never had a plus one to bring anyway, so he hadn't really paid attention, even when Crowe kicked Tredd for it.

Nyx looks at him fondly, like he _knows_. He can't, though, because he wouldn't have offered the beer and the seat if he had. "S'all right, didn't think I was gonna go this year anyway."

Libertus squints at the empty lot before them. "Mind telling Crowe that? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I'm uninvited if I don't manage to drag you back there."

Nyx laughs, a little laugh that sounds like heaven. "Guess you'll be stuck out here with me, then."

Libertus frowns, and Nyx looks away. Libertus feels something tighten in his gut then, an ache he can't place, and suddenly he's worried, worried that he's been so afraid to fuck something up between them that he's fucked it up anyway, because if he was any kind of friend, Nyx wouldn't be moping out here alone right now.

What happened? Did Nyx have other plans, and that's what he meant when he said he wasn't gonna come? Did he have plans _with someone?_ But he's here now, so — did some asshole dump him _during the holidays?_ Did some asshole dump _Nyx?_ Did —

"What's out here?" Libertus asks, nodding out over the lot. He had to stop and take a deep breath to get a hold of himself, and now that he has, he notices something's a little different.

"Ah, well, I — " Nyx waves his hand, sizzle of magic, and a few of the little lights flare up. Libertus realizes there are candles out there. Tiny flickers of starlight on a few ledges, gleaming over the concrete and the metal and the dust, a faint color haze, like the spirit lights that he can imagine still swim somewhere above the Insomnia smog.

It's kind of breathtaking, in a place where Libertus is used to seeing people beat the shit out of each other and throw up on the regular. Leave it to Nyx to make it beautiful.

"Kinda reminds me of home," Nyx says.

Libertus isn't sure what to say.

Nyx shifts. "Remember when we first came out here?"

He sounds a little guilty, and Libertus thinks that if Nyx regrets dragging Libertus into this, Libertus really did fuck up somewhere along the way. Nyx had said abruptly a month after they lost Selena, _I'm joining the Glaive,_ and Libertus had held his hand and said without thinking _me too,_ and he remembers seeing the King's magic flicker between Nyx's fingertips for the first time, awe on his face, and Libertus hadn't regretted it for a minute since, not for a second. "Yeah."

"Tours are up in a month," Nyx says.

Libertus glances at him, wary. "Yeah. You gonna do another?"

Nyx exhales.

Nyx looks like he's been thinking about it a while, and like he's kinda torn. Libertus tries to come up with a way to say it doesn't matter, he's gonna do whatever Nyx winds up doing, but so that Nyx doesn't get all worked up about it and feel responsible for the both of them. He's not entirely sure how to do it though, because Libertus is used to just opening his fat mouth and saying shit, and he never wants to make Nyx flinch, which is why he's never even tried to — but before he can reply, Nyx speaks up again.

"You think we could do a bar out here?"

Libertus raises his eyebrows — imagines Nyx, this Nyx, all lean muscle from training, drying glasses with a dish cloth behind the counter in some dive, tee rolled tight over his biceps — before he can stop himself. "Yeah, and none of the shit that passes for kebab out here," he points out. "Real food. Like your mom used to make. We could split the rent and you could stay in the flat above the place, so that you can get away from your dickface landlord." Gods, Libertus needs the chance to punch that guy.

Nyx cracks a smile. "What about you?"

"Me? I could live nearby. You could get custody of Crowe on the weekends." Libertus wonders if Nyx has been thinking about this. "We'd do great, until..." _Until we can go home_ , he thinks, "... this all blew over."

"Dunno that the war's gonna blow over that easy," Nyx says light, and then he turns, and there's a slight waver in his brow, candle lights sparking in his blue eyes, and in that moment Libertus knows Nyx is gonna tell him that he should quit. That Nyx is gonna sign up for another tour and Libertus should take Crowe and go start that bar and make a real life. That Libertus should leave Nyx be.

Nyx is never gonna look like he's gonna cry, because Libertus is the one who cries.

"Shit, you all right?" Nyx says, suddenly alarmed, and Libertus wipes hastily at his face, getting salt water all over his mittens. "Hey, hey. You're all right," Nyx continues, and his hand is on Libertus's back, rubbing a little up-and-down pattern as Libertus starts to choke on a lump in his throat.

 _You ever gonna talk about this,_ Crowe had demanded of him once, slurring and half-drunk, and then she'd gestured to _all_ of Libertus, as if to say _this mess,_ and then she'd pointed at Nyx in what she probably thought was a surreptitious way. She'd texted him the morning after, too — _did_ _u talk,_ she'd said, and he'd texted back _NEVER_ and gone back to sleep. How many fucking years was it, how many years has it been?

Maybe it's the dark, or maybe it's the fairy lights, or maybe it's the little bit of snow dust coming down, or maybe it's the beer (it's not the beer, Libertus has had two sips, tops).

"Nyx, you know? I mean. Hey. I just," Libertus is babbling, too loud, and Nyx is just looking at him more and more concerned, his hand warm through Libertus's jacket, and Libertus can't stop this now, it's out of his hands. Damn.

"I love you," Libertus blurts, relief and self-destruction all at once.

Nyx just looks perplexed and concerned still. "Yeah?" He doesn't get it.

"Yeah," Libertus warbles. "Okay. Not like you think, all right?"

"Sure," Nyx says warily, and he's still not hearing it, still trying to figure out what's wrong. 'Course he is. Nyx does that.

"No, listen, asshole. Not like you think," Libertus says emphatically, before he can break down totally, as if he isn't well on the way there already.

He sucks in a deep breath, holds it. Nyx waits while the silence stretches out uncomfortably. Libertus turns to him and glowers, cheeks pink, and finally tries again.

"If I kissed you right now, would you punch me in the face?"

"No, never," Nyx says, taken aback.

"I'm not gonna kiss ya," Libertus clarifies.

"Okay."

"But if I did. Would you punch me?"

"Libertus, I'm not gonna punch ya," Nyx says, exasperated, and if Libertus wasn't such a stupid — a stupid idiot, he thinks — he'd lean over and kiss Nyx now, but all Libertus can do is stare at his mittened hands around his beer in his lap.

"I want to," Libertus mutters. His face feels aflame.

"You can kiss me, all right?" Nyx says, like he's seven and offering  _you can have my pancake too if it'll make you feel better._

That's some pity, and if they hadn't been friends for so long, if they hadn't been all each of them had left, if Nyx hadn't been _Nyx_ , Libertus would hate him for it. "Forget it," Libertus fumes, and Nyx dares laugh. Bastard.

When Nyx stops laughing, and he's just grinning over at Libertus, he manages to say, "For how long?" He still sounds like he's just been told a joke and it's the funniest thing he's ever heard.

"Don't even ask," Libertus grumbles, because sure this is humiliating, but it's still better than Nyx actually punching him and running off.

The fairy lights are full flame now, wax melted and sending up sparks in different colors, gold, green, blue, pink in a blur through Libertus's wet vision. Nyx next to him smells kind of like cologne and beer and cinnamon, like he'd just come back from the cold air outside the pub, midwinter back in Galahd, shaking bits of icicle from his hair.

Libertus closes his eyes as Nyx's fingers move from his back to his shoulder and then curl around the side of his neck, tugging him close. Nyx presses warm lips to his cheek, and his forehead, and the corner of his mouth, letting the contact linger determinedly, like he wants to leave a mark. Libertus can feel him chuckle, a rumble through his skin.

"That good enough for now?" Nyx says, pulling back.

Libertus shakes his head before he can even really clock the _for now._ He can't find anything to say.

Nyx just gets to his feet. "Crowe waiting for drinks still?"

"Nyx," Libertus says, desperate, half-turned, and Nyx's hand comes to rest on his shoulder: _not going anywhere._

"I just meant they're probably hurting over at Pelna's," Nyx clarifies, "If all you got 'em was that dinky bottle of red."

"It was a _good red,"_ Libertus splutters, and Nyx laughs again, and pulls him to his feet.

The benches are all empty behind them, and the snow's really coming down through the open roof now, soft diagonal whisper into the dips and ridges of the terrain, settling in uneven blue and pink drifts on the ground like it used to back in Galahd canyon. There's a long night left ahead of them, the longest in the year.

"You meant what you said? About loving me?" Nyx says, quiet at Libertus's side. If the words trip him up, he gives no indication.

"Yeah," Libertus says, and it takes all the breath in his body out of him.

"Then I meant what I said about the bar," Nyx says.

Libertus turns to look at him, and Nyx is unreadable, but he doesn't look away for a long moment.

"Wait, what does that mean," Libertus has the presence of mind to blurt when he finally realizes he has no fucking _clue_ , but by then Nyx is shrugging on his jacket, pulling out his phone to text Crowe, walking back towards the exit, and Libertus is left to haul the remaining beer up onto his hip and scramble behind.

\--

(They never set up that bar in Insomnia.

It's a long time after, sun high in the sky, when Libertus is out in Lestallum cursing and trying to balance on a ladder for long enough to pull down the old signage above the scrappy little space he's rented in the old district, and he's distracted enough he doesn't notice the pickup truck rolling up, and someone getting out behind him, and watching him struggle for a full eight minutes before the amused voice says, _Hey. You want another set of hands?_

The people weren't all immigrants back in Insomnia, anyway.

Out in Lestallum, they know how to _eat._ )

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, y'all :) 
> 
> \- [mushydesserts.tumblr.com](https://mushydesserts.tumblr.com/)


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